Coffee may kill you Ð but chocolate is better than exercise!
Date Published: {J}
There is a predilection – in tabloid newspapers in particular – for health scare stories based on surveys that really require much credibility but which must have a shock factor that draws in the reader.
On a news list, they’re known as ‘Coffee Can Kill You’ stories.And they work in a sort of cycle whereby one quasi-scientist tells you that eating bacon will give you brain tumours before – two weeks later – another says a slice a day is the secret to a long life.
Never is this more apparent than with drink, where one survey tells you that wine is the source of all evil and another insists that a glass or two a day will keep you hale and hearty until you’re a hundred.
In the same context, everyone who reaches their century is always asked for their secret to long life. You despair when they put it down to a life of abstinence and hard work – and you’re thrilled when they advocate a glass of whiskey or a bottle of stout. Because if one nip can help you make 100, then surely a feed of them will keep you alive forever.
These survey play on our insecurities and sometimes – in a way that only the weirdest of minds can work – they help us to justify our unhealthy existence.
Not that you’d need any poetic licence with one such recent survey which proclaimed that chocolate was as good for you as exercise – not a word of a lie.
Scientists in Detroit, publishing their conclusions in the US Journal of Physiology, found that small amounts of dark chocolate may improve health in a similar way to exercise.
These ingenious researchers – who admitted were working with mice – focused on the mitochondria, these tiny powerhouses in cells that generate energy, and discovered that a plant compound found in chocolate, called epicatechin, appeared to stimulate the same muscle response as vigorous activity.
Aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling, is known to increase the number of mitochondria in muscle cells – and the study has found that epicatechin seems to bring about the same response - particularly in the heart and skeletal muscles.
A specific type of epicatechin from cocoa was given to mice twice a day for 15 days. At the same time, the animals underwent 30 minutes of treadmill training each day.
Researchers found that mice only fed epicatechin had the same exercise performance as those running on the treadmill.
Middle-aged mice who both exercised and ate epicatechin showed an even greater benefit – but the fact is that middle-aged mice have already lived longer than their pals because they were cute enough not to go chasing cheese in traps.
Anyone who suggests that chocolate is as good as exercise deserves the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but even when the findings aren’t this clear cut, we have an ability to selectively read these surveys so that you eventually come up with a health plan that includes drink, coffee, red meat and a lack of stress because of a hectic social life and a lie-in every morning.
That said, another recent survey to hit the headlines recently suggested that the morning lie-in is the last thing you should contemplate in your pursuit of happiness.
Because this survey has found that people who get up early in the morning – as in, that they are up and out of bed just before 7am – are slimmer, happier and healthier than those who enjoy a lie-in until just before 9am.
To be honest, I was happiest when I was up at seven in the morning – but that was when I was younger and only coming home from the night before. The only reason to be up now at seven is because the advance of years has seen a corresponding decline in bladder capacity.
And yet the compilers of our UK survey found that those who fight the urge to ignore the alarm clock complete morning chores faster, pack their children off to school earlier and thrive in the workplace, researchers concluded.
But people who can't resist a lie in have a higher chance of feeling depressed or stressed and becoming overweight.
For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.